Love it, BUT…

So, just installed this plugin today because all the others I found were far too full of fluff – I just wanted to be able to put in some sharing buttons without coding it myself – I didn’t want any of those like buttons that counted the likes or anything, I just wanted some sharing buttons.

Installation was instant.

Settings were long winded, but pretty quick because most of them were the same settings just for different social networks so you quickly realised what you could skip over and what needed setting.

Done.

Decided to exclude the icons from a couple of pages – easy & quick so long as you read the instructions when you were setting up

So yes, dead easy, pretty quick, works perfectly.

However, having completed the website, I ran the P3 plugin on the site 3 times (as I always do) – and found that this social sharing plugin was the slowest 1 of 3 times, and marginly second slowest 2 of 3 times.

What’s wrong with that you say? Well, the other plugin that was around the same mark as it was the All In One Events Calendar – a HUGE plugin (notorious for being slow, but in this case performing pretty well) – I just can’t see any reason a lightweight social sharing plugin should be as slow as an events calendar.

It is not slow enough to be a problem on it’s own for me and fortunately this site has only 4 plugins in total – but, this is an area I would recommend looking at Synved, after all, you are marketing it as a lightweight plugin.

At some point I may pit it up against some of the bigger social media plugins like shareaholic.

I’m not sure how that P3 plugin works but I have some doubts on its accuracy, simply because the way WordPress works (hooks and filters) makes it really hard for you to extrapolate what plugin brings what weight.

The most reliable way to measure the “weight” of a plugin is to first load your site with the plugin disabled through a service such as pingdom.com, then enable the plugin and do the same. Performing 5 tests each time and averaging the result.

Keep in mind the Feather plugin has to load the images for sharing & following for which load time will necessarily increase.

Fair reply! Thank you, I shall use that method instead!
The P3 plugin was pretty pants to use anyway – user interface was horrific and buggy.
Results seemed true, but I did wonder how they were measuring, I just assumed there was some magic that I didn’t know about… which there probably is.

I did take into consideration I had to load images – but one of the plugins that apparently didn’t take as long yours is loading audio – though thinking about it now, it doesn’t start loading or playing until the user presses play so I don’t know that that would of effected it much at all!

Well, I didn’t use pingdom cuz it costs money, I found a free alternative – it’s not very good, but assuming it’s at least slightly accurate, the average of 5 tests with your plugin enabled and 5 without actually loaded slightly faster with it enabled.

So pretty inconclusive results but would support your argument that the P3 plugins results were maybe a bit misleading!